Deroy Murdock: Where is the GOP alternative to Obamacare?

AT HIS AUG. 9 news conference, President Barack Obama spoke with journalists in the White House East Room about Republicans and Obamacare.

"At least they used to say, 'Well, we're going to replace it with something better,'" Obama said. "There's not even a pretense now that they're going to replace it with something better."

Unless Republicans want Obama to keep spouting such nonsense, they must craft and at least pass through the GOP House one single bill that would scrap Obamacare and put something far better — and Republican — in its place.

Republicans are 1,000 percent correct to try to defund, repeal, and replace Obamacare. With its employer mandate postponed for a year, most health-insurance exchanges far from ready for their Oct. 1 debut, medical premiums zooming to the Moon, and its 10-year price tag soaring from $940 billion at enactment to $1.8 trillion today, Obamacare has become both unworkable and a knee-slapping mockery of its official title: "The Affordable Care Act."

American patients and taxpayers alike should applaud GOP efforts to derail this runaway train safely out of town, before it barrels onto Main Street with its gears stripped, brakes shot, and tank cars clogged with toxic cargo.

That said, Congressional Republicans badly need to plant their rumps into some hard chairs and unify around a solitary GOP alternative to Obamacare. They should endorse its elements, pledge to adopt it if they win the Senate, and constantly sell it as the best means to prevent this looming disaster.

Such a measure — call it the Patient Power Act of 2013 — should promote choice and freedom, limit government meddling, and pry Uncle Sam from between Americans and their doctors.

Specifically, the PPA should:

• Repeal Obamacare.

• Create a robust market in which individuals — not bosses or politicians — can choose to own and control portable health plans.

• Shift tax-deductibility of health premiums from employers to employees, to help workers purchase the coverage that they — not CEOs or senators — prefer.

• Let Americans purchase health and pharmaceutical policies across state lines, just as they now may buy life, home, and apartment coverage from vendors across the U.S.A.

• Free Americans to open voluntary, tax-free Health Savings Accounts from which they can finance over-the-counter drugs, routine medical care, and catastrophic insurance for severe ailments.

• Entice doctors to deduct from their taxes the dollar-value of their charity care for poor and uninsured patients. Let a million free clinics bloom.

• Establish high-risk pools to help insure those with pre-existing conditions.

• Limit federal involvement to supplying health-insurance subsidies to those remaining Americans who cannot care for themselves nor find relief through civil society, local and state government, or the initiatives outlined above. Rather than ruin medicine for 316 million people, government should assist the tough cases who cannot secure help elsewhere. Instead of disastrous micromanagement, Washington simply should offer direct cash payments to help the truly needy and infirm buy private health plans that satisfy their needs.

As Forbes contributor Merrill Matthews noted, a recent survey among some 2,500 federal employees discovered that 92.3 percent of them want to keep their existing coverage and avoid Obamacare.

When even the Big Government workers who would run Obamacare reject it, the time has come to dispatch this smoldering wreck to the scrap yard.But before the Congressional GOP can expect the American public to climb aboard the medical bullet train that they envision, Republicans themselves need to embrace its blueprints.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.